Blogs / 80beats

In a signal that president-elect Barack Obama will take a drastically different approach to global warming than the outgoing Bush administration, Obama sent a video message to a group of governors who had gathered to discuss climate policy. He reiterated his campaign promise to establish a nationwide cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide emissions as soon as possible, and repeated his ambitious goals: “We will establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them by an additional 80 percent by 2050,” he said [Reuters].

President George W. Bush famously pledged to tackle global warming when campaigning for the presidency in 2000, but backtracked when in office, saying that the science had not yet been settled. In contrast, Obama made clear that he had no intention of retreating from his campaign promises despite the worsening economic climate, and said that the science is beyond dispute. “Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all,” Obama said. “Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high, the consequences too serious” [San Francisco Chronicle].

(more…)

Madeleine Pickens, wife of the eccentric billionaire tycoon T. Boone Pickens, wants to ride to the rescue of a beleaguered national icon. The wild horses that have been an emblem of the wide-open American West for centuries more recently became a major headache for the federal government, which routinely removes some of the horses from 1o Western states to prevent overpopulation and protect grazing land. But as the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) holding facilities grew crowded, federal officials gingerly announced that they were considering a euthanasia program to cull the herds at their facilities and contain costs.

Pickens, a racehorse breeder and lifelong animal lover, said she was horrified when she learned about the problem. “There’s got to be a way to bypass [the BLM] — why does it have to be Washington to solve the problem?” said Pickens, who, along with her husband, airlifted 800 cats and dogs stranded by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and brought them to California for adoption [Washington Post]. Pickens approached BLM officials and suggested an alternative: She would buy 1 million acres of rangeland somewhere in the West, and convert it into a permanent retirement home for the roughly 30,000 homeless and unwanted horses.

(more…)

The U.S. Supreme Court has sided with the Navy over the Pacific Ocean’s whales, declaring that the Navy can continue its military exercises using high-powered sonar, despite environmentalists’ arguments that the sonar can harm whales’ ears or cause the panicked animals to beach themselves. The court ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that national security needs override these concerns. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, stating: “Of course, military interests do not always trump other considerations, and we have not held that they do. In this case, however, the proper determination of where the public interest lies does not strike us as a close question” [ABC News].

The lawsuit centered on 14 sonar exercises that the Navy wanted to conduct off the coast of Southern California to train seamen in detecting enemy submarines. In his opinion, Roberts stressed the military threat posed by modern subs. “Modern diesel-electric submarines . . . can operate almost silently, making them extremely difficult to detect and track.” America’s potential adversaries have at least 300 of these subs, he said. “The president — the commander in chief — has determined that the training with active sonar is ‘essential to the national security’” [Los Angeles Times].

(more…)

The U.S. Department of Energy is lobbying to expand the controversial plan to store nuclear waste inside Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, even as the entire project’s fate is thrown into uncertainty with the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s next president. The locally unpopular project has been repeatedly delayed due to lawsuits and safety concerns (the federal government originally promised to start accepting waste from nuclear power companies in 1998, but is now scheduled to open in 2020), and Obama has previously signaled that he might scrap the facility all together.

Yet recent statements by the Energy Department’s Edward Sproat underscored the urgency of finding some safe, final destination for the United States’ growing piles of nuclear waste. Sproat told Congress last week that the 77,000-ton limit Congress put on the capacity of the proposed Yucca waste dump will fall far short of what will be needed and has to be expanded, or another dump built elsewhere in the country…. He said within two years the amount of waste produced by the country’s 104 nuclear power plants plus defense waste will exceed 77,000 tons [AP]. Sproat suggested that Congress scrap the limit, or else empower the Department of Energy to search for another site for a secondary facility.

(more…)

American voters may have enthusiastically chosen to send Barack Obama to the White House as the next president of the United States, but the Bush Administration still has 76 days in office and seems to be making the most of that time by passing a host of so-called “midnight regulations.” Many of these last-minute rule changes relax environmental regulations, and watchdog groups say these controversial changes may be difficult for the incoming president to undo.

Some of the rule changes would ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms. Those and other regulations would help clear obstacles to some commercial ocean-fishing activities, ease controls on emissions of pollutants that contribute to global warming, relax drinking-water standards and lift a key restriction on mountaintop coal mining [Washington Post]. If the rules take effect before inauguration day, the incoming Obama Administration would have to begin a long and complicated regulatory process to reverse them.

(more…)

New measurements of a rare but potent greenhouse gas finds levels to be four times higher than previously thought. Nitrogen trifluoride (NF₃), used mainly in the manufacture of flatscreen TVs and microcircuits, is 17,000 times more powerful at trapping heat than an equal mass of carbon dioxide. Although NF₃ is currently responsible for only 0.15 percent of human-induced global warming, the new analysis indicates that levels of the gas are rising “quasi-exponentially” [New Scientist].

Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California looked at air samples taken in California and in Australia. They found that over the past three decades, the atmospheric concentration of the gas has increased more than 20-fold, from 0.02 to 0.454 parts per trillion, with most emissions occurring in the Northern Hemisphere. The overall amount of the gas in the atmosphere, estimated in 2006 at less than 1,200 tonnes, was then actually 4,200 tonnes and has since risen to 5,400 tonnes, they report in Geophysical Research Letters [subscription required] [Nature News].

(more…)

As the turmoil continues in the world’s financial systems and countries brace for an economic downturn, many environmentalists and green tech entrepreneurs are posing the question: How will this crisis impact the young renewable energy sector?

Some worry that ambitious projects won’t be able to get the financing they need from troubled banks wary of lending money, while others note that oil prices have dropped fast based on predictions of lower demand. Advocates are concerned that if the prices for oil and gas keep falling, the incentive for utilities and consumers to buy expensive renewable energy will shrink. That is what happened in the 1980s when a decade of advances for alternative energy collapsed amid falling prices for conventional fuels [The New York Times].

In Europe, environmental ministers are meeting to finalize the European Union’s goals for cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, but new discord has broken out. Nations like Italy and Poland have begun to argue that emission cuts must be scaled back to avoid further hardship for industry during the hard economic times. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said: “Our businesses are in absolutely no position at the moment to absorb the costs of the regulations that have been proposed” [BBC News].

(more…)

A legal battle is raging on over whether gray wolves should be removed from the endangered species list in both the Northern Rockies and the Great Lakes region, with the federal government and environmentalists fighting over whether the wolf populations have recovered. But the situation has been made more complicated by a biological battle over whether the present-day wolves are the same animals, genetically speaking, as the wolves who lived in North American forests hundreds of years ago.

The court cases began when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lifted protections from wolves in the Great Lakes states in 2007, and from wolves in the Rockies earlier this year. Environmental groups contested both decisions. The Great Lakes decision was overturned in September when a judge said the wildlife agency hadn’t followed the law; the Northern Rockies ruling covering the states of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana was also overturned. After wolves were allowed to be shot on sight across most of Wyoming — and all three states began planning public hunts — U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy in July issued an injunction to block the killings. On Tuesday, Molloy went a step further, restoring the animal’s endangered status [AP]. However, wildlife officials say they’ll try to delist the wolves again in 2009.

(more…)

The Supreme Court heard arguments today on whether environmental laws can be used to prevent the U.S. Navy from conducting sonar exercises off the coast of California, where some researchers believe the sonar could harm whales and other marine mammals. Last March, a federal judge strictly limited the sonar practice, but the Navy appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.

The lower court’s order disrupts the Navy’s war-game exercises, which are “critical to the nation’s security,” said U.S. Solicitor Gen. Gregory Garre. He also disputed claims that the piercing sound of the sonar causes severe harm to the whales. But Los Angeles lawyer Richard B. Kendall described the sonar as like the sound of “a jet engine in this room multiplied by 2,000 times.” He said beaked whales, in panic, dive deeply to escape the sound, and they sometimes suffer bleeding and even death when they try to resurface [Los Angeles Times].

(more…)

An ambitious, multibillion-dollar effort to restore Florida’s Everglades is floundering due to bureaucratic delays, and the ecosystem may be close to a tipping point, according to a new congressionally mandated report. The longer the project remains stalled, the higher its cost will rise — even as the River of Grass that it’s supposed to rescue declines, the report from the National Research Council says. “If we don’t do something soon, we’re going to lose this really precious resource,” said [report coauthor] William Graf [St. Petersburg Times].

The report criticizes progress on the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, which was approved by Congress in 2000. The massive effort to restore natural water flow to about 4 million acres of wetlands was originally estimated to cost about $7.8 billion and take 30 years to complete — a price tag that has since ballooned due to rising costs…. The 2000 plan made the federal government and Florida 50-50 partners. To date, the state has committed more than $2 billion and pushed ahead alone with a few projects. Congress has only appropriated several hundred million dollars [AP].

(more…)

Researchers may have found a away to avert the doom many predict for commercial fisheries around the world. A system in which individuals are apportioned a fixed share of each year’s catch shows great promise in averting the collapse of fish stocks, according to a new study, in contrast to traditional “open access” rules in which fishermen compete to bring in the biggest load. “Under open access, you have a free-for-all race to fish, which ultimately leads to collapse,” said [lead researcher] Christopher Costello…. “But when you allocate shares of the catch, then there is an incentive to protect the stock, which reduces collapse. We saw this across the globe” [Reuters].

The results are a rare bit of good news in the debate over what’s to be done about the world’s fisheries; in a previous study, researchers predicted that if overfishing, pollution and habitat destruction continue unabated, all of the world’s fisheries would collapse by 2048. A fishery is considered collapsed if catches fall to 10% of historic highs [Los Angeles Times].

(more…)

The House of Representatives passed an energy bill including a provision that will allow for more oil and gas drilling off U.S. coastlines, but the compromise measure doesn’t go far enough to please Republicans, and doesn’t include enough protections to mollify environmentalists. The bill would allow drilling as close as 50 miles from the coastline if adjacent states agree and 100 miles out no matter a state’s position [The New York Times].

The bill faces significant hurdles to becoming law: The Senate must vote on its own version of the energy bill, which is expected to place much more conservative limits on offshore drilling, then the two bills must be reconciled, and finally the finished product must be sent to the unwelcoming White House. President Bush, who has called for ending the offshore drilling bans, signaled he would veto the legislation if it reached his desk, arguing that it would stifle offshore oil development instead of increasing it [AP]. Lawmakers also have a strict time limit, as Congress is scheduled to adjourn on September 26.

(more…)

A British jury has cleared six Greenpeace activists of causing criminal damage when they vandalized a power plant last year in a protest over global warming, based on the defense attorneys’ argument that the protesters were trying to prevent even worse damage from climate change. Yesterday’s verdict is expected to embarrass the government and lead to more direct action protests against energy companies [The Guardian].

Last October, the Greenpeace protesters scaled the smokestacks of a coal-fired power plant as a publicity stunt to protest the United Kingdom’s continued reliance on coal-fired power plants, which emit large amounts of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. The protesters were halfway through painting a slogan on the side of one smokestack (”Gordon, bin it,” a British way of asking Prime Minister Gordon Brown to chuck coal), when the police served the activists an injunction by helicopter and forced them to stop. They were charged with causing more than $50,000 in damages based on the cost of removing the paint. E.ON, which owns the power plant, said that the company was in a state of shock over the verdict [The Times].

(more…)

Forest scientists have come to a surprising conclusion regarding old growth forests and their majestic, mature trees: They’re not just relaxing in their arboreal old age, but are still actively taking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The new study suggests that protecting old growth forests may be just as important as planting new trees in efforts to reduce carbon dioxide levels and fight global warming.

Previously, researchers believed that only young, fast-growing trees absorbed enough carbon dioxide to be considered significant “carbon sinks.” Old, crowded forests don’t allow for much new growth: The only new growth occurred in the small spaces that opened up when large old trees died and decomposed, releasing their accumulated carbon. The forests at large were therefore considered to be carbon neutral, and accounted as such in climate models [Nature News]. But the new study shows that the slow but continuous growth of old trees means that they continue to suck up more carbon than they release.

(more…)

An international group has given India special approval to buy nuclear technology to further its nuclear power program, although the country has steadfastly refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The decision, made by the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), was strongly supported by the United States, which hopes to sell the technology to India. The NSG adopted a one-off waiver of a 34-year-old global ban on nuclear trade with India, allowing New Delhi and Washington to do business [Reuters].

The proposed deal between the United States and India still has to be approved by the U.S. Congress, and there are several roadblocks to its immediate passage. Congress will be in session for only two weeks this September before breaking again for the final flurry of campaigning before the November election, and supporters of the India deal will have to pass special legislation to expedite the approval process. ‘‘I’d say the chances of it getting past the senate are 50-50,” a Senate aide said. ”Senators are good at tying things up in knots” [Times of India].

(more…)